Sunday, January 24, 2016

Plan (Not) To Be Productive Today

I read a lot of productivity books and articles, and try to
share some of what I read on this blog. Thinking along the lines of how to be
more productive all the time, can counter-intuitively, be less productive.

As I usually do at the end of one year, and the beginning of
the next, I have been thinking a lot about how I spent the year and what
changes I want to make. I also looked through my time tracking data to
see how much time I spent working and writing and working out. What I saw
surprised me – I didn’t work as much as I would like. But I didn’t do as much
of consciously chosen leisure activities as I would like either. I don’t track
every minute of my time, especially time spent watching TV, travelling, doing
little things around the house. And I suspect a lot of my time was used up in
obvious ways. But I also suspect that I 'wasted' a lot of time that didn’t really
register with me, on Facebook or playing a game, waiting for something, or in
between activities. Which would be ok, not terribly bad, if it weren’t for something
else. I felt like I didn’t have enough time for personal projects or meaningful
leisure activities.

In an effort to work harder and move certain aspects of my
career forward, I decided to embrace weekly thinking rather than daily thinking
(something I learnt from 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam). This meant that I took
the time to run important errands on a weekday or meet someone if that was the
only time possible, and make up that time on the weekend. But this started to
become a regular habit, and basically every day became a weekday – I took
plenty of breaks, but no day completely off. Or I felt incredibly guilty if I did.
Additionally, there were many things that I wanted to do that I didn’t give
myself permission to indulge in, except very occasionally. I recently started
dabbling with paints as a hobby, but seeing as this was clearly a leisure
activity, I found it hard to do it when I could easily be sitting down and
getting some work or house priority tackled instead. Besides, painting takes a
lot of set-up and winding down time, so I could only do it in large chunks of
time, which made it harder to justify.

One of the leisure activities I made time for recently...

What I didn’t notice however; was how cranky and irritable I
had started to get, especially when things didn’t go as planned, and extra
responsibilities were put on my plate. Without realizing it, I had started to
be very difficult to be around. As a result of some conversations with my mum,
and taking advantage of a slightly slower start to the year, I experimented
with scheduling time to paint, and to do other renewing activities such as go
for a swim in the middle of the day.

In just over 10 days, I found a remarkable change in my
attitude – I am happier, less annoyed with others and even less interested in
dessert (a side benefit I didn’t see coming!). In fact recently, someone asked
me if I was overwhelmed in my volunteer position, as the person supposed to be
helping me was probably not going to be able to. I was surprised at her
question, because I didn’t feel stressed at all.

It's not easy to make time for personal priorities when the world
has a hundred demands on your time. But I recently realized that the demands
are going to keep coming, no matter what you do. You are better off scheduling the
important things first, and along with work and family responsibilities, don’t forget
to schedule something that is replenishing for you as well. I experimented with
creating time to work out and to paint in my day, and then fitting my chores
and other tasks around them. I also began to be aware of just how much
discretionary time I waste in a day, time that could be better spent doing
something mindfully, something that is totally unproductive but matters to me,
and makes me more productive in the other areas of my life as a side effect.